(McCain called Merkel's approach
"milquetoast.") To Merkel, Ukraine was
a practical problem to be solved. This
mirrored Obama's view.
On the day I spoke with Rhodes,
July 17th, the TV in his o ce, in the
White House basement, showed the
debris of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17
strewn across a field in eastern Ukraine.
The cause of the crash wasn't yet clear,
but Rhodes said, "If it was a Russian
shoot-down, and Americans and Euro-
peans were on board, that's going to
change everything." In Germany, the
change happened immediately. The
sight of separatist fighters looting the
belongings of dead passengers who had
been shot out of the sky hit Germans
more personally than months of ugly
fighting among Ukrainians had. A ci-
vilian airliner, Dutch victims: "People
realized that the sentimental attitude
toward Putin and Russia was based on
false assumptions," a German diplomat
said. The idea of maintaining equidis-
tance between Russia and the West on
Ukraine vanished. Though the crisis
was beginning to hurt the German
economy, Merkel now had three-quar-
ters of the public behind her. In late July,
the E.U. agreed on a sweeping new
round of financial and energy sanctions.
Since then, Russian troops and
weapons have crossed the border in
large numbers, and the war has grown
worse. In a speech in Australia last week,
Merkel warned that Russian aggression
was in danger of spreading, and she
called for patience in a long struggle:
"Who would've thought that twenty-
five years after the fall of the Wall . . .
something like that can happen right at
the heart of Europe?" But, on the day
she spoke, the E.U. failed to pass a new
round of sanctions against Russia. Gut-
tenberg, the former defense minister,
said, "We are content with keeping the
status quo, and kicking the can up the
road---not down---and it keeps falling
back on our feet."
The close coöperation behind the
scenes between Washington and
Berlin coincides with a period of public
estrangement. Germans told me that
anti-Americanism in Germany is more
potent now than at any time since the
cruise-missile controversy of the early
eighties. The proximate cause is the rev-
elation, last fall, based on documents
leaked by Edward Snowden to Der Spie-
gel, that the National Security Agency
had been recording Merkel's cell-phone
calls for a decade. Merkel, ever impassive,
expressed more annoyance than outrage,
but with the German public the sense
of betrayal was deep. It hasn't subsid-
ed---N.S.A. transgressions came up in al-
most every conversation I had in Ber-
lin---particularly because Obama, while
promising that the eavesdropping had
stopped, never publicly apologized. (He
conveyed his regret to Merkel privately.)
"Tapping her phone is more than impo-
lite,"Rainer Eppelmann, the former East
German dissident, said. "It's something
you just don't do. Friends don't spy on
friends."(American o cials I spoke with,
though troubled by the e ects of the
breach, rolled their eyes over German
naïveté and hypocrisy, since the spying
goes both ways.)
German o cials approached the
Americans for a no-spy agreement, and
were refused. The U.S. has no such ar-
rangement with any country, including
those in the so-called Five Eyes---the
English-speaking allies that share virtu-
ally all intelligence. German o cials
claimed that the U.S. o ered member-
ship in the Five Eyes, then withdrew the
o er. The Americans denied it. "It was
never seriously discussed," a senior Ad-
ministration o cial said. "Five Eyes isn't
just an agreement. It's an infrastructure
developed over sixty years."
"I tend to believe them," the German
diplomat said. "The Germans didn't
want Five Eyes when we learned about
it. We're not in a position, legally, to
join, because our intelligence is so lim-
ited in scope."
In July, o cials of the German Fed-
eral Intelligence Service, or B.N.D., ar-
rested a bureaucrat in their Munich
o ce on suspicion of spying for the U.S.
He had been caught soliciting business
from the Russians via Gmail, and, when
the Germans asked their American
counterparts for information on the man,
his account was suddenly shut down.
Brought in for questioning, he admitted
having passed documents (apparently in-
nocuous) to a C.I.A. agent in Austria for
two years, for which he was paid twenty-
five thousand euros.The Germans retal-
iated, in unprecedented fashion, by expel-
ling the C.I.A. station chief in Berlin.
Coming soon after the N.S.A. revela-
tions, this second scandal was worse than
a crime---it was a blunder. Merkel was
beside herself with exasperation. No U.S.
o cial, in Washington or Berlin, seemed
to have weighed the intelligence benefits
against the potential political costs. The
President didn't know about the spy. "It's
fair to say the President should expect
"According to the map, the treasure should be right behind that door."